Resilience

Crisis often is a driver of change – and resilience is about enhanced capacities to actively and positively manage this change and enable wellbeing in spite of shocks, stresses and uncertainty. Integrating a resilience lens into project and programme design and implementation adds value in terms of increasing the impact of project activities by particularly identifying and strengthening capacities of individual, communities and institutions beyond the mere capacity to absorb crises.

By strengthening the resilience of people, communities, organisations and institutions we focus attention on the capacities to overcome the adverse long‐term consequences of acute, slow-onset, chronic and recurrent crises – and not just of their immediate effects. We support people and institutions to develop capacities and long-term solutions to anticipate, absorb and adapt to foreseeable crises – and to transform structures and livelihoods to manage, navigate and sustain change in complex systems.

A few projects we have successfully supported:

• In the period 2014 to 2016, we carried out the BMZ-Resilience-Learning-Initiative (RLI) together with implementing partners as the World Food Programme (WFP), Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (ASB), Welthungerhilfe and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The objective was to learn from experiences to strengthen the resilience of people, communities and institutions on the ground. Case studies conducted in Bangladesh, Haiti and Madagascar helped to analyse existing resilience capacities and identify useful approaches to build and strengthen them.
• We have successfully supported BMZ and GIZ in developing and producing fact sheets and handouts on resilience, resilience building and analysis of resilience capacities in fragile states – both at project and portfolio level.
• As part of a multi-country study in India, Mali and Malawi, we developed, tested and successfully applied a methodology to systematically analyse the different resilience capacities (absorption, stabilisation, adaptation and transformation) in various project realities of the GIZ Global Programme ‘Food and Nutrition Security / Strengthening Resilience’